Sig Christenson: Today’s story angle

Surrounded by fellow journalists as we prepared to join the 3rd Infantry Division for its drive to Baghdad, I marveled at the harmony between journalists and the military. A good number of us had wondered about how well we would all get along as well as how the public would greet the newly minted “embedded” reporter. It seemed it was love at first sight.

But then, love and glory are so often fleeting.

Remembering the Vietnam War and how it started with strong public support, I knew what was coming if our foray morphed from the blitz into Baghdad to a Saigonesque quagmire. Our relationship with the military and our readers and viewers, I warned, would go downhill. Some politicians would blame reporters rather than themselves. In time, an old post-Vietnam myth would arise from the ashes of this war, placing blame for our defeat not on governments, troops and leaders but on the media. The damage from Iraq, I told my friends, would last for a generation &mdash just as it did in the wake of Vietnam.

All that has come to pass, but things are worse. The battle for hearts and minds is being fought not just in Baghdad and Kabul but right here in San Antonio. The “strategic” communications policies designed to maintain support for our wars hatched out of the Pentagon and our commands overseas are being matched by public affairs shops here.

How? In subtle ways that would surprise you.

A few days ago, I helped fellow reporter Gilbert Garcia with a story on Councilman Philip Cortez. It seems that Cortez, an officer in the Air Force Reserve, led the mayor and City Council to believe that he had been ordered to training at Fort Meade, Md., on short notice, and asked that his fiancee temporarily replace him. It turns out, however, that Cortez actually had known for some time about his orders to attend the Defense Information School. I got that information from a public affairs officer at a local base and passed it on to Garcia.

Before leaving the office last Friday, I sent an e-mail to the officer asking how long Cortez had expressed interest in attending the school and taking a new job in public affairs. In a short response I saw this week, I was asked to detail my story angle.

I haven’t answered until now.

If you think that’s a normal question for a military public affairs officer to ask, you would be wrong. Nobody I know in the PAO community asked that question before the invasion.

Now it’s a common practice. Military public affairs officers ask it with no evident shame.

To ask that question is to betray your fear that the story might be negative, which, if you ask me, is sort of silly. News by its very nature dovetails to the negative. Most of us know that if you wind up on the front page, it’s probably because it’s a bad-news story.

A lot of commanders hate bad news, of course, and their aides and public affairs officers will do whatever they can to mitigate it. That is perhaps natural in a military that is largely careerist and, as a result, extremely risk-averse and intolerant even of minor mistakes.

But it is also ironic.

Our troops are sworn to protect and defend the Constitution and its guarantee of press freedom. They and others often like to say that freedom isn’t free, that they have sacrificed and others have died and been maimed to preserve our freedom.

When a military public affairs officer asks what my story angle is before answering a simple question, what I am really hearing is a veiled threat, that their cooperation is conditioned upon my response.

I think this is where the deteriorating relationship between the media and the military has led us, and it is beyond my ability to fix. I’m out to discover the truth and, I am sorry to say, too many military public affairs officers do their best to stop me, Virtually every journalist I know who covers the military has said the same thing these past few years.

The tension and distrust worsens by degrees. It’s Vietnam all over again, and it’s time to start a public conversation about what is happening and why it is bad for our country.

Meanwhile, the next time I call your public affairs shop, things might go a little easier if you simply answer my question. I’ll worry about the story angle, thank you.

Sig Christenson

2 Responses

It is a shame. I have spent most of my adult life around and with Army folks since just after the Viet nam war. Never could understand the antipathy toward the media. But, it is very real, always present beneath the veneer of courtesy.